A story about one programmer’s dedication (or obsession) to finish a project that had already been killed.
Author Archives: Dom Cimafranca
An operating system for cities: How IBM plans to make your city smarter
Link
Davao made a splash in tech headlines late last week because of a deal with IBM to become one of the Smarter Cities program. Davao joins Lyon, France and Bend, Indiana as the three cities in the pilot. Under the program, IBM will install monitoring systems, data analysis programs, and executive decision support systems to improve city services.
Should computer programming be on par with reading and writing?
Here’s a somewhat controversial article from ReadWriteWeb: a proposal to make computer literacy as important as basic literacy. From the article:
Everyone ought to be able to read and write; few people within the global mainstream would argue with that statement. But should everyone be able to program computers? The question is becoming critically important as digital technology plays an ever more central role in daily life. The movement to make code literacy a basic tenet of education is gaining momentum, and its success or failure will have a huge impact on our society.
via Computer Programming for All: A New Standard of Literacy.
My take on this: yes, but…it can’t (and probably shouldn’t) be done with programming languages as they exist today. The state of the art presents too many non-programming-related cruft in front of the user, whereas the actual meat — the algorithms, the analysis — gets lost and diluted.